Creating Controlled Vocabularies in OJS3

Software Support
1

I’ve noticed a couple questions on the forum regarding the creation of controlled vocabularies for OJS3 or at the least changing keyword and subject metadata fields into dropdown menus or selection lists rather than simple free-text fields. OJS3, In fact, doesn’t seem to give us keyword, subject, geography or any other metadata fields when making a submission (or afterward for that matter) free-text or otherwise (besides section, title, abstract and contributors).

We’d really like to add controlled vocabulary to the metadata of each submission. In our cases we are looking for the ability of the author to indicate primary and secondary specializations (two separate dropdown lists) and a selection list allowing the authors to indicate the languages the article focuses on (linguistics journal).

I suspect this is harder to do than it first appears. So I have 3 questions. First, what happened to the subject, keyword, etc. metadata fields with the updgrade from 2.x to 3.x? Second, has anyone successfully created controlled vocabularies as indicated here? Finally, are there future plans to build this functionality into OJS3 in a timeframe that would keep me from trying to develop this on my own?

2

Hi @James_MacDonald,

@ajnyga is the one who made most progress in this:

3

Hi,

Yes, the plugin I made is here: GitHub - ajnyga/finto: Integrates YSO ontology from the Finnish Finto service to the keyword field in OJS3.. It uses the FInnish Finto service that has a REST API: http://api.finto.fi/.

At the moment I am storing the both the keyword and the URI to the same field: “Keyword [http://www.yso.fi/onto/yso/p7910]”

What we would need in OJS (in my opinion) would be:

  1. The ability to save Keword+URI pairs so that the data is saved into separate fields in the database.
  2. The ability to define API settings for keyword fields in OJS